The Cynical Christian

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The New York Times Doesn’t Know What Easter Means

From the Department of Stuff We Kind of Already Knew, Really: The New York Times had to issue a correction because they didn’t know what Christians are celebrating on Easter, once again demonstrating that they don’t understand Christian beliefs and can’t even be bothered to spend five minutes on Google to look them up.

To be clear, not only is Easter not about Jesus’ “resurrection into heaven,” Christians don’t believe Jesus “resurrected into heaven” period. There are some ancient creeds that could be quickly accessed (for those who have never heard them) that explain all this. Those creeds confess Christ’s ascension into heaven, not “resurrection.”

All I ask is that you remember this whenever the Times pretends to be an authority on anything. They’ve got a lot of graduates from the Columbia Journalism School, but they don’t know as much about Easter as your average graduate from Vacation Bible School.

Since when in the history of the English language has anyone ever spoken of a “resurrection into heaven”? The phrase itself makes no sense; one resurrects from something — the tomb, Death — and then goes on to other things: “ascension,” for example, which is coming right up. As for the Assumption, that’s another miracle altogether. And don’t get me started on the confusion attending the Immaculate Conception.

They say you tend to believe what you read in the newspaper until the story concerns something you actually know about. The Times has just proven to 1.2 billion Catholics around the world that it knows nothing about their religion. Read it on all subjects accordingly.

Update, again (and bumped): Of course we’ve got to hear from Mark Steyn:

Not to know any of this stuff, to be as tone-deaf to it as that Times correction, is to be entirely unmoored from your cultural inheritance – regardless of one’s “faith tradition” (as Al Gore would put it). I contributed a couple of arts pieces to the Times years ago, so I know a bit about the extraordinary layers of editors between the author and the page, and it’s remarkable that not one person up the chain raised an eyebrow over “resurrection into heaven” before it hit the streets. Judging from leftie reaction to the “correction”, to the hyper-secularists, ignorance of the peripheral tenets of a minor cult is a badge of honor. In reality, America’s supposed “newspaper of record” has just announced itself to the world as civilizationally illiterate.